VLC Media Player 2 ‘Twoflower’ ships

20 February 20121,812 viewsNo Comment

This is a major upgrade with faster decoding on multi-core, GPU, and mobile hardware and the ability to open more formats, notably professional, HD and 10bit codecs. There’s an all-new user interface that’s beautiful and easy to use — much to like in this whole number release.

VideoLAN.org has shipped VLC Media Player 2 “Twoflower”, a total makeover of an already well-liked and widely used video playback app. Like Lemkesoft’s GraphicConverter, which can open almost any image format, VLC likewise can open and play dozens of codecs and their variants.

• Formats
— Multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM
— Support for 10bits codecs, WMV image and some other codecs
— Rewritten support for images, including jpeg, png, xcf, bmp, etc
— Important changes in RealVideo and Real Format support
— CrystalHD cards and Android OpenMAX support for hardware decoding

• Input and devices
— Experimental support for BluRay discs: Menus are deactivated in this release (will come soon)
— AACS and BD+ DRM libraries and keys are not shipped, for legal reasons
— Support for SDI capture cards and QTKit devices
— Support for new adaptive streaming protocols, like HLS and DASH

• Mac specific features
— Completely new, single window interface: Available in Lion grey or QTX black
— Extensions support and better Lion integration
— Support for all QTKit devices through qtcapture and qtsound modules
— Continued support for X 10.5 and PPC users (1080p and ProRes on Dual-G5!)

• Features for pro users
— Support for ProRes 422 and 4444, AVC/Intra
— Support for Jpeg-2000 and DNxHD/VC-3 in 10bits
— Support for EBU subtitles (stl) and EIA-608
— SDI and HD-SDI card support for input on Linux
— New Dirac/VC-2 encoder, faster than the previous one

• Features for devs
— libVLC, libVLCcore and libcompat have switched from GPL to LGPLv2.1+
— New libVLC examples are available: media player, photobooth and mediainfo clones
— New JSON requests on the web interface to control running VLC instances
— Implementation of the MPRIS2 interface to control media players
— VLC’s web plugins have been rewritten for better integration and stability in all browsers

Get your very own copy of VLC Media Player 2.0 here — there are versions available for Mac OS X 10.6 and up, Mac OS X 10.5 (PPC, Intel), Windows and various flavors of Linux, as well as legacy builds for older operating systems.